My Glass Heart when the Sky Opened

“There were eight of us that day. Our mission was simple. Our ship separated into three parts to stage an explosion that would go down in history as the biggest failure in American history, due to multiple reasons. Mainly rubber gaskets,” Erin pauses. His eyes examine Glass’s uncanny beauty. Her long flowing hair and piercing eyes remind Erin of his wife, and daughter. He paces around the marble floor of the high-tech Lighthouse. “What really happened… was that we–the United States Government–discovered how to harness solar and nuclear energy. The three segments of our Rocket ship warped to different coordinate’s at 300 x the speed of light, simultaneously. We needed to give the illusion of a fatal miscalculation… Who would have ever imagined a world… like this. So close to Earth. Tell me, Glass, how long have you been here.”

“Long enough,” Glass says, smiling. Her warm chuckle is very casual, further easing Erin’s fear while piquing his interest. Glass lights a cigarette and exhales. “Honestly, my software says about 200 years, but I wouldn’t know. Any one of my memories could be a fabrication; even meeting you here, like this, could be part of an internal protocol that I don’t know about.”

“I assure you, I am real. Unless your programming can account for my own memories, which, I’m sure, you have no access to, there is no way I could be a construct of your operating system.”

Glass shrugs and takes another puff. Her slender fingers and thin, busty frame make her resemble a pinup model in Eskimo attire. “There’d be no real way of knowing, would there?” Glass claps, snaps her fingers and manifests a digital screen.

“Holy! Jesus!” Erin roars, falling on his rear. “W-w-wha-My god! Is that a computer?”

“Are you so surprised?” Glass points at herself. “Look at me.” Her fingers swipe up and at down. “I’m a computer too.”

Glass and Erin laugh.

“If your comrades were with you, this should help us find them. Every inch of this tundra is covered by sensors and cameras.”

“Incredible!” Erin reaches for the HoloScreen. He pauses and looks at Glass.

“Go ahead.” She nods.

Erin tinkers with the center screen, manipulating the other four screens’ placements. He sets the displays in linear formation. “There, now I can assess which screen does what.”

“Seems inefficient to me. You really could have just asked for each windows’ function.”

“It’s more fun this way.” Erin stacks screens 3, 4, and 5 to the right of vertically-aligned screens 1 and 2. “It appears as though, these three displays output the data collected from the environment, screen two sets the parameters and screen one is a miscellaneous display.”

“You got it…” Glass claps her hands and snaps her thumbs. The HoloScreen dematerializes and reappears in front of her. Glass manipulates the parameters on screen two. “This should help us locate your companions. Your temperatures run surprisingly hot for a organic creature. 981 Fahrens is almost 250 ticks above the healthy average.”

Fahrens? Erin wondered. A bleep on monitor 4 catches his attention. ” What the hell is that?!” He shrieks pointing at a hairless bipedal creature pursuing a man. “Oh man! That’s my crew mate! We have to–”